Biometric deployments are everywhere. The technology is being used to facilitate a range of physical and logical access, support secure ID verification for payments and other utilities, and it’s the technology that millions of people now use to unlock their phone dozens of times each day.

But biometric technology wasn’t always so pervasive, and for college campuses the technology has only recently exploded in popularity as a means to facilitate student-facing services around campus. For Throwback Thursday, we’re taking a look back to 2004 and our “Bolt-on biometrics for the college campus” story that discussed what was then an emerging concept for college campuses.

For the purpose of the piece, the term “bolt-on” referred to biometric deployments that could be — in a fairly simple and painless fashion — added onto existing campus card infrastructures to enhance the overall end user experience. The piece lays out how a campus can identify where biometrics could be best utilized on campus, and crucially, how to identify whether the student body could properly utilize the technology. Just as interesting is the accompanying set of FAQ’s that lay out a basic understanding of biometrics as a technology as we understood is 13 years ago.

While the concept was advanced for 2004, we can now look back and see just how far biometrics as a technology has progressed. In the piece, fingerprint and hand geometry are identified as the front-runner modalities for a campus deployment, with campuses like the University of Georgia spearheading hand geometry deployments as far back as 2004. As we now know, the contemporary biometrics landscape has seen quicker, more exact and secure modalities — iris, finger vein, gait, facial recognition, etc. — come to the fore.

Modalities aside, though, the idea of biometrics on campus was very much alive and kicking even in 2004. And credit where it’s due, university administrators and campus card professionals alike have continued to embraced the technology throughout the years, realizing along the way that new technology always has a seat at the table.